For me, it has been needful that brain and heart should work in unison in the life of a man in order to render his story worthy of being embalmed in a biography. Mere intellect is not sufficient; mere emotion unsatisfactory. For thirty years I knew all about and I also knew John Worth Kern. Heaven molded him with a clear and analytic mind--a mind capable of grasping and elucidating the great problems of state--and then Heaven further endowed him with a tender and loving heart, so that much as he believed in the principles for which he stood and the faith which he avowed, he had that large-hearted and generous judgment of his fellow men which mark, to my mind, true greatness. It is the measure of a little man to be cocksure, to be eternally and everlastingly right, to be quite certain that Jehovah gave into his hands all knowledge, all goodness and all power. It is the measure of a really great man to walk with certainty and yet to walk humbly in his public life, granting to other men the right to think, to speak, to act freely. This was the grade of man John Worth Kern was. He showed it in his brilliant services at the bar, in his forceful presentation of his party’s principles on the stump and in that kindly, loveable leadership which, when he left the Senate of the United States, made it the supreme desire of political friend and foe alike to do something for him as the shadows of night began to gather around his head. To my mind he was one of Indiana’s great and illustrious citizens whose life, when read by the schoolboy of to-day, will help to sweeten, glorify and adorn the public service of to-morrow. It were impious here to speak of his beautiful home life. He was great in the counsels of his party but in his home he transcended the common mortal and became a demigod of love and good will. The Indianian will know him and love him even more, if possible, when this biography is read and it is remembered that it is the free-will offering of a man who saw our dear, dead statesman and citizen in his hours of exultation, in his moments of depression, when his soul was bare to the inspection of a man who knew when he saw what he saw. THOMAS R. MARSHALL. CONTENTS CONTENTS I--CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YOUTH 1 The wilderness physician--Alto--Birth of Kern--Playing doctor--Life in Iowa--The partisan of 1860--Kokomo Academy--The equestrian orator--The pedagogue--Alto society--A temperance speech--The actor in “The Demon of the Glass”--The boy orator--Ann Arbor days--Letters to Morrow--Visit to Canada--The slate-maker of 1868--Views on Indiana politics--Hears Gough, Philips and Whipple--Work in the Douglas Society--His reconstruction views--Hears Zack Chandler--His thesis--Graduation--Taken for a maniac. II--KOKOMO DAYS--LAWYER AND CITIZEN 27